Avalokiteshvara

Avalokiteshvara, the lord who looks down, is the bodhisattva of compassion, and he is the same figure in Tibet, China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam under names that no longer resemble one another. The atlas keeps him as a single figure because the transmission is documented and continuous, not because the differences are trivial.

The core commitment is a vow: to hear the cries of the world and to decline final nirvana while any being is still suffering. Chapter twenty-five of the Lotus Sutra, the chapter called the Universal Gate, states that he takes whatever form will reach the person who calls, and lists thirty-three of them, including a monk, a king, a child, a naga, a deva, and various female forms. This is the doctrinal hinge on which the later Chinese development turns.

In Tibet he is Chenrezig, the patron of the country, and the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum is his, carved into rock faces, printed on flags and turned in prayer wheels across the Himalaya. The Dalai Lamas are held to be his emanations, which is the basis of their institutional authority.

In China he is Guanyin, one who perceives the sounds of the world, a rendering of an earlier form of the name. In Japan he is Kannon, and Sanjusangendo in Kyoto holds a thousand and one of his images. In Vietnam he is Quan Am. In Korea, Gwaneum.

The Indian cult is attested early and well. Faxian recorded monks making offerings to Avalokitesvara at Mathura around 400, and Xuanzang gave eyewitness accounts of venerated statues in the seventh century. The Karandavyuha Sutra, which is largely about him and is the source of the six-syllable mantra, is dated to the late fourth or early fifth century.

He is male in all of that. What happened next in China is the subject of the next article.

The Indian Avalokitesvara is male. The Chinese Guanyin, for most of the last thousand years, is female. That change is one of the best-documented transformations of a religious figure anywhere, and it also carries claims repeated more confidently than the evidence allows.

What is established. Avalokitesvara is masculine throughout Indian Buddhism, in the Sanskrit sources and in the iconography at Gandhara and Ajanta. Chinese representations before the Song dynasty, which began in 960, are masculine in appearance. From roughly the twelfth century the female depiction becomes dominant in China and remains so.

Whose argument this is. The standard treatment is Chun-fang Yu, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara, Columbia University Press, 2001. Yu treats the change as indigenization of Buddhism in China: a Chinese process working on an Indian figure. Anyone claiming the shift began in India is disagreeing with the standard account and needs to say so.

Where the raw material came from. The thirty-three manifestations of Lotus Sutra chapter twenty-five, which include female forms, are Indian and scriptural and supplied the warrant. But they are forms taken temporarily for a purpose, not a statement about the bodhisattva's identity, and the Chinese development made an occasional form the standing one.

Indigenous Chinese material. The Miaoshan legend, in which Guanyin is a princess defying a cruel father, is carried in the Precious Scroll of Fragrant Mountain, a Chinese scripture with no Indian original, and is traced to Jiang Zhiqi in the eleventh century at Xiangshan. The standard monograph is Glen Dudbridge, The Legend of Miao-shan, 1978.

What is not stated here. No dated image is offered as the earliest female depiction; the sources support century-level claims only. And no female Avalokitesvara is attested in India.

The Guanyin case exposes a problem that runs through this whole table: deciding when two figures are one.

Buddhism's ordinary method on encountering a local deity was not denial. Hariti, a yakshini who ate children, is converted by the Buddha and becomes a protector of childbirth, fed by the monastic community in perpetuity. Mahakala takes the name and much of the form of Shiva, recast as a worldly deity subdued and bound to oath. Hayagriva is a horse-headed Vishnu given a different character and a different job. Vaishravana is Kubera. Benzaiten is Saraswati with a sword and a snake. In each case the local being is not destroyed; it is taken into the order and given work.

That is worth stating carefully, because it is a Buddhist claim about someone else's god, made by Buddhist authors, and it is not conceded by the traditions on the other side. Shaivas do not accept that Shiva was subdued by a buddha. The atlas records who made the identification and when, and does not adopt it.

Guanyin is the same problem in a harder form, because the absorption ran the other way and inward. Chinese religion did not keep Buddhism, Daoism and popular cult in separate compartments, and Guanyin is worshipped by people who would not call themselves Buddhists, in temples that also house Daoist deities, under a mythology, Miaoshan, that has no Indian source. She acquires functions Avalokitesvara never had, above all the granting of children, in the Songzi Guanyin, the child-giving form. It would be defensible to argue that Guanyin is a Chinese goddess who took an Indian name.

The atlas has not taken that view, and keeps one entry, because the textual and iconographic transmission is unbroken and the tradition itself asserts the identity. But the decision is a judgment call, it could have gone the other way, and splitting the figure into three unrelated entries, which is what the atlas did before this entry existed, was the one clearly wrong answer.